Was it just my imagination, or did I hear a small ripple of applause from the forests, the wetlands and the glaciers, as the news of the collapse of Bear Stearns leaked into the public realm? There are many precursors of economic collapse; one is the sudden upturn in the price of gold, another is a rise in the little known “skyscraper index” — both of which signal the move by the wealthy to invest their money into things that may hold their value longer than pieces of electronic data whizzing around the networks of the world’s investment banks and clearing houses. No one will be surprised that Bear Stearns’ collapse means recession is imminent, and the investors are popping Prozac like cups of coffee.
And that ripple of applause? It’s because with recession comes a drop in consumer spending, a reduction in the number of goods being made and moved around the world, a slump in the sale of houses, vacations, big cars, air conditioning, patio heaters: a downturn in the carbon engine that has, for the last three decades been driving the global temperature inexorably upwards as the amount of money swilling around in the consumer economy keeps growing.
Recession stops greenhouse gases being emitted.
This is no piece of environmental wishful thinking. While researching A Matter Of Scale, I discovered that the link between global trade and carbon emissions was closer than I had ever suspected.
Between 1950 and 1970, international trade (imports and exports) grew from $60 billion to a still relatively modest $317 billion: growth of 413 percent in 20 years is impressive, but nothing compared to later on. International trade started to climb rapidly after 1975 – because the graph only shows trade between different nations, the freeing up of international markets during the 1970s is particularly visible, as is the massive global recession in the 1980s, and the explosive growth in the international trade of consumer goods since 2000.
These variations in world trade between 1975 and the present day are closely matched by changes in carbon dioxide emissions – with the notable exception of the early-1990s, when the smokestacks of much of Europe stopped belching with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and the emergence of natural gas as a cleaner generator of electricity. This blip was not to last long.
Recessions may hurt the indebted individual; some of whom have hardly enough to feed their family, but many more who have over-reached with their desire to buy things on credit that they would otherwise have done without – was that new TV or car really necessary? More than that, though, global recessions hurt the capitalist drug-pushers who keep topping up our desire to keep the global economic engine growing with their cries of, “Buy! Buy! Buy!”.
As they now cry, “Sell! Sell! Sell!” how many of them will start to realise that the price tag on the atmosphere is far bigger than any mortgage, far bigger than any pension, and a great deal bigger than the global economy.
Are unsustainable activities recklessly driving economic globalization taking the family of humanity toward some sort of colossal ecological wreckage?
What could be happening?
Perhaps powerful people and huge human institutions are driving the relentless, and soon to be unsustainable, expansion of the global political economy, that is requiring unbridled increases of economic production/distribution capabilities, conspicuously unrestrained per-capita consumption of resources and the continuous growth of absolute global human population numbers.
But why?
As we having been observing in recent months, another huge “bubble” has been “manufactured” by economic powerbrokers and allowed to grow ominously within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, the sub prime “bubble” is doing now what bubbles eventually do. Bubbles burst. We can readily observe how the credit markets of the world banking system are seizing up, stocks are tumbling and the value of the dollar is sinking. Who knows, a financial meltdown of the economic system worldwide could be in the offing.
How could this be happening?
For a moment, let us consider that the organizers, managers and Wall Street whiz kids overseeing the global economy (and the unraveling of the worldwide sub prime swindle) are running the artificially designed economy of the human community as a pyramid scheme. This is to say straightforwardly that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth rises pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated endlessly. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. In the 1980s, this global financial operation was called a “trickle down” economy. We have been told over and over again how this economic scheme “raises all ships.” From this limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources in 2008 appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ‘ships’ carrying these billions of people do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Could anything be done to beneficially change these unfair, inequitable and, in so many billions of instances, intolerable circumstances?
Of course. There is plenty to do. The global economy is undeniably a manmade construction. Because the world’s economy is a product of human activity, our economic system is known to one and all to be imperfect. Afterall, human beings can better themselves and their imperfect products can be ameliorated. Only works of God are perfect, I suppose. With this in mind, if it is so that the human economy is imperfect, it is just as obvious that the global economy of the family of humanity can be re-designed, modified and otherwise changed, as necessary. The system of economic globalization can be reorganized, “downsized” and “powered down” so that the global economy meets the primary needs of majority of people. In this way, the economy of the human community could be sustainably reconstructed so as to realize more fully and more equitably the principles of democracy.
What are the principles of sustainable ENVIRONMENTAL ECO:NOMICS?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/the-long-johns-the-last-laugh-george-parr-subprime/483770241
A “sub prime†example of how the wealthy are destroying the world we inhabit ???
Buddy, Can You Spare a Billion?
By Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
Friday 04 April 2008
Meet Alan Schwartz, welfare recipient.
As the chief executive of Bear Stearns, he’s getting rather more public assistance than your typical welfare mom – specifically, $30 billion in federal loan guarantees to help J.P. Morgan Chase take over his firm. But then, Schwartz has had rather more than his share of suffering of late.
As his firm collapsed, he was forced to forgo his entire 2007 bonus, leaving his compensation for the past five years at a paltry $141 million, according to Business Week. Things have become so bad that, the Wall Street Journal discovered, Schwartz has had to rent out his 7,850-square-foot home on the ninth green of a suburban New York golf course – leaving the poor fellow with only his 17-room, seven-acre home in Greenwich, his condo in Colorado and the athletic center he built for Duke University.
Schwartz’s tale of woe tugs at the heartstrings all the more because he and his colleagues at Bear Stearns were, he believes, blameless for the bankruptcy of two hedge funds and the subsequent collapse of the 85-year-old investment bank. “I am saddened,†Schwartz told the Senate banking committee yesterday. He was saddened that Bear Stearns was undone by “unfounded rumors and attendant speculation,†despite its impeccable balance sheet.
“Due to the stressed condition of the credit market as a whole and the unprecedented speed at which rumors and speculation travel and echo through the modern financial media environment, the rumors and speculation became a self-fulfilling prophecy,†Schwartz told the senators. “There was, simply put, a run on the bank.â€
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) asked the corporate-welfare recipient whether he shares any blame for his indigent circumstances. “Do you believe that your management team has any responsibility for the company’s collapse?â€
Schwartz could think of no missteps – not even his decision to remain at a conference at the Breakers in Palm Beach while his firm was imploding. “I just simply have not been able to come up with anything, even with the benefit of hindsight,†said the blameless chief executive, escorted into the hearing room by superlawyer Robert Bennett.
Fortunately for Schwartz, he had a sympathetic audience in the banking committee, whose members have received more than $20 million in campaign contributions from the securities and investment industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. “I want the witnesses to know, and others, that as a bottom-line consideration, I happen to believe that this was the right decision,†Chairman Chris Dodd (D-$5,796,000) said before hearing a single word of testimony.
“You made the right decision,†Sen. Evan Bayh (D-$1,582,000) told the regulators who worked out the loan guarantee.
“The actions had to be done,†agreed Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-$6,162,000).
Only a minority of senators, particularly those with smaller pieces of the campaign-cash pie, dissented. “That is socialism!†railed Sen. Jim Bunning (R-$452,000). “And it must not happen again.â€
To the extent the lawmakers objected to the Bear Stearns bailout, they worried that the Fed’s actions would create a “moral hazard†– an economic term of art – that, as Shelby put it, “encourages firms to take excessive risk based on the expectations that they will reap all the profits while the federal government stands ready to cover any losses if they fail.â€
Shelby’s notion was a curiosity for the senators, who don’t often spend a lot of time worrying about moral hazards. No fewer than five other senators invoked the phrase. “I think the moral hazard was minimized,†Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, one of the witnesses, reassured the senators.
No moral hazard, however, would interfere with the lawmakers’ compassion for the beleaguered Schwartz and his fellow witness, J.P. Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, who had given a combined $260,000 in political contributions in recent years – a small part of the $1.7 million their co-workers contributed in this election cycle alone. That’s a sizable handout – but a good investment compared with the $30 billion federal hand-up.
“On behalf of all of us here on this dais, our sympathies go out to your employees,†Dodd told Schwartz after his opening statement. “There’s no adequate way we can express our sorrow to them for what happened. Obviously, shareholders, same sort of feelings, but obviously the employees particularly. It’s a particularly hard blow.â€
Of course, some might consider $30 billion an adequate expression of sympathy, but Dodd was apologetic as he gently probed Schwartz. “You both will have forgotten more in the next 10 minutes than I’ll ever probably understand about all of this,†he told the witnesses, but didn’t the irregular trading at Bear Stearns mean than “more than just rumors†were behind Bear Stearns’s demise?
“You could never get facts out as fast as the rumors,†Schwartz explained. “It looked like there were people that wanted to induce panic.â€
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) reminded Schwartz that two of the firm’s funds went bankrupt in 2007. “It caused concern, not only here but on Wall Street,†the senator said. “Did that dramatically alter your behavior?â€
Evidently not. “I’m not sure I understand the question,†Schwartz
Dear Dr. L. B.,
I am imagining that your questions are rhetorical ones.
You ask,
“Why are politicians and skeptics so willing to risk their future and everyone else’s future on blindly clinging to a course of action that has a high probability of leading to a seriously crippled future? If you even suspect that global warming represents a serious risk to your survival (and we have far more than suspicion these days), why wouldn’t you do everything protect and conserve your planet?â€
It would please me to hear from others; but from my humble perspective the “answers†to your questions are all-too-obvious.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our shared fantasies of endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction oand overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me?†generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the understanding that we are no more or less than human beings with “feet of clay.â€
We live in a soon to be unsustainable way in our planetary home and are proud of it, thank you very much. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.†We will fly around in thousands of private jets and live in McMansions, go to our secret clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the wealth and the power it purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our ‘rights’ to ravenously consume Earth’s limited resources; to expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; to encourage the unbridled growth of the human species so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We have no regard for human limits or Earth’s limitations, thank you very much. Please understand that we do not want anyone to present us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making…… a manmade world filling up with distinctly human enterprises which appear the be approaching a point in human history when global consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species become unsustainable on the tiny planet God has blessed us to inhabit….. and not to overwhelm, I suppose.
Third, even our top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the reckless dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at a breakneck pace toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability†at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Sincerely,
Steve